Quixey raises $3.8 million for smart app discovery

With the explosion of apps, the app discovery game has also turned into a competitive market, and a number of services are now looking to be the place where users find quality apps. And these start-ups are pulling in big funding to make sure they’re the go-to resource in this expanding market.

The money will go toward the expansion of Quixey, which tries to partner with websites, app stores, search engines and carriers to offer its services. Quixey is trying to stand out by offering what it calls a functional search engine, which takes in more than just a title and description of an app but pulls in information from blogs, forums, review sites and social networks to better understand what an app actually does. Then it allows users to enter queries on what they want to do with an app, without having to know the name of a particular app. It pulls up results for apps on various platforms including Android, iPad and iPhone as well as recommendations for Windows, Mac, Explorer, Firefox and the web.